Jazzing up the organ: Trudy Pitts brings new sound to festival

John A. Lacko | Special to the GazetteJazz organist Trudy Pitts, who performed at the Gilmore Keyboard Festival preview last September, is on the lineup April 30 and May 1-2.

Trudy Pitts is the greatest jazz organist you've never heard of.

The 70-something Philadelphia native's first gig as a jazz organist was with tenor giant John Coltrane.

She played with other jazz greats such as Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Golsen and Clark Terry and mentored the younger jazz-organ star Joey DeFrancesco.

Somehow, though, she never took off like the others.

"Her priorities were family first, church, teaching at universities and then performances, so she never got her just due," husband and manager Bill "Mr. C" Carney said.

Pitts will perform in the Irving S. Gilmore International Keyboard Festival's upcoming Noon Series. She is new to the festival and was a hit at the festival preview last September.

"I can't wait to get back there," Pitts said about Kalamazoo. "We had a great time -- the feeling, the environment, the reception. It was a blessing to me."

Jazz organ also is new to the festival, and Pitts seems the perfect choice to play it. She is, after all, one of the last direct links to the musicians who established the organ as a jazz instrument in the 1950s.

Those musicians were her peers: Jimmy McGriff, Don Patterson, Charles Earland, Shirley Scott and Jimmy Smith. Before them, the organ was mostly heard in churches, movie houses and skating rinks.

The use of the Hammond organ in black churches led to experimentation with blues and jazz, and then Jimmy Smith became famous for his style at the instrument, eventually making it a popular jazz instrument, Pitts said.

"Jimmy Smith was at the helm of that sound, and he was a good friend," said Pitts, who played at Smith's funeral in 2005 along with jazz keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith.

"Before jumping to the organ and discovering a new opening for music, he was playing piano. Then, as he was influenced by some of the older guys -- Bill Doggett, Bill Davis -- he jumped to the organ.

"It's about evolution. Jimmy Smith came across a new idea, a new sound. It's a thing that comes from the spirit."

Pitts knew so many of the pioneers of jazz organ because most of them hailed from Philadelphia or spent significant time there, she said.

The jump from jazz piano to jazz organ was particularly significant for jazz because it expanded colors of sounds and led to the synthesizers that dominated the jazz-rock movement, Carney said.

Interest in jazz organ waned, then emerged again in the 1990s with the popularity of DeFrancesco, who was first introduced to Pitts when he was 6 years old.

While many people think piano and organ are similar, "there is no comparison between an organ and piano, except they both have keyboards," said Pitts, who first studied piano.

"With an organ, you have to mentally accommodate more than one set of keys. Both feet are going on the pedals," she said. "For me, it demanded a whole lot of another type of focus. But 'challenge' was the word that inspired me and made me want to do different things on the organ."

Pitts started playing the piano when she was 6 years old. She loved to practice. She was born into a musical environment: Her mother sang and played classical music, and her father was an avid classical-music listener.

Her first exposure to the organ was at her church, where traditional hymns were played on a pipe organ. She later graduated from Philadelphia Music Academy, which is now the University of the Arts.

She listened to jazz pianists such as Art Tatum, Earl Garner and Ahmad Jamal and eventually taught herself to play jazz.

In the mid-1950s, she got a call from Carney, who would later become her husband. He was a percussionist and business agent who was looking for someone to replace Shirley Scott in a band with Coltrane. Pitts agreed to the gig, and so began her professional career in jazz.